Category Archives: Telecommunications Industry

Twisted Pair Adds Private Call Capability to its WAVE Mobile Communicator

Twisted Pair Solutions today announced that it has added point-to-point Private Call capability to its WAVE Mobile Communicator application for smartphones and tablets.

With Private Call mode selected, users can use a secure, one-to-one PTT capability with any other member of a WAVE communications system. Once the Private Call is complete, either user simply hangs up and the device returns to its pre-call state.

Twisted Pair’s announcement comes as many organizations seek a secure, reliable replacement for Sprint’s iDEN push-to-talk (PTT) network which was decommissioned at the end of June.

“The enterprise customer wants seamless communication, from radio systems to telephony systems to PTT systems to workforce apps,” said Tom Guthrie, Twisted Pair president and CEO. “WAVE is the only platform- and device-independent PTT solution proven to deliver secure, high-quality communications for the enterprise.”

The WAVE Mobile Communicator turns your smartphone or tablet into an instant communication PTT device. When equipped with the WAVE Mobile Communicator, a smartphone acts like a multichannel radio handset that sends and receives secure audio. WAVE servers residing in an enterprise data center, in a cloud environment or, if needed, on an individual PC, manage audio processing, management and distribution. The Private Call capability further differentiates WAVE as an over-the-top PTT solution that combines the richness of enterprise communications with workforce communications while offering increased flexibility over proprietary solutions.

Customers may deploy WAVE as an on-premise enterprise solution or as a cloud service. Twisted Pair offers its own cloud service, called WAVE Connections, which subscribers can access over any carrier or WiFi data network.

Cloud Data Center Draw is Often Power

Interesting trend reported on by James Glanz of the New York Times. Ample access to electrical power is driving up data center rents across the river in New Jersey — to levels higher than the trophy skyscrapers in Manhattan.

…electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary.

Read “Landlords Double As Energy Brokers”.

Evolve IP, NACR Partner for Unified Communications, Hosted Contact Centers

Today Evolve IP announced it has partnered with NACR, an independent integrator of communications solutions. With this agreement, NACR will leverage Evolve IP’s  unified platform to offer its customers cloud services including unified communications/hosted IP phone servicesvirtual servers, and call center solutions.

NACR serves over 5,500 clients from small businesses to Fortune® 100 and global enterprise clients. Through this relationship, NACR’s customers gain access to Evolve IP’s cloud services including:

  • Unified communications/IP phone systems that provide advanced features such as fixed mobile convergence (FMC), find me/follow me, unified messaging, HD voice, and more, all delivered as a cloud service but with the quality and control of on-site equipment.
  • Virtual servers that utilize Evolve IP’s private cloud infrastructure to reduce CAPEX while improving IT productivity. Evolve IP’s virtual servers leverage the scalability and failover of public cloud services while maintaining the privacy and security of dedicated environments.
  • Hosted contact centers that improve operations and customer service with intelligent routing and queues, call recording, call whisper, and every major feature needed to run a best-practice call center.

Interop Technologies Adds RCS Version 5 Features to Cloud Technology

Interop Technologies, a provider of core wireless solutions for advanced messaging, over-the-air handset management, and connectivity gateways, today announced that its Rich Communication Services (RCS) solution now supports a network address book and social presence. The network address book synchronizes a user’s contacts among different devices including mobile phones, tablets, and PCs. With social presence, RCS users receive rich, real-time information, such as availability, location, favorite link, and portrait icon, for each of their contacts.

Interop Technologies is demonstrating its enhanced RCS solution at OMA Demo Day on February 27 during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The network address book and social presence features are aligned with the GSMA-managed RCS Blackbird and Crane releases, which include subsets of priority RCS version 5 features. Using an XML document management server (XDMS) and presence server, the Interop solution stores social presence and service capability information and makes it available in real time to RCS users. Since May 2012, the fully compliant, cloud-based Interop RCS solution has also supported legacy messaging interworking, an RCS version 5 feature providing backward compatibility with Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS).

Interop has made the enhancements available in its interoperability testing (IOT) environment currently in use by multiple RCS client vendors and smartphone manufacturers. As client and handset vendors release new versions of RCS client software, they can continue to test against the Interop RCS solution to ensure that standards compliance and interoperability are achieved.

RCS, branded as “joyn” by the GSMA, gives subscribers innovative communication options including video chat, one-to-one and group messaging, file transfer, and real-time exchange of image or video files during communication sessions. Because the Interop solution enables operators to offer RCS without a costly and complex IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core, operators can compete with popular “over-the-top” (OTT) services without expensive changes to their current network. In addition, Interop’s cloud technology option minimizes up-front costs and speeds time to market.

“Our client-agnostic, cloud-based solution now includes multiple RCS version 5 capabilities in line with the Blackbird and Crane releases, resulting in the most advanced, feature-rich RCS solution available today,” said Steve Zitnik, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Interop Technologies. “By deploying in the cloud, operators can provide their subscribers with this state-of-the-art communication option quickly and cost effectively.”

For more information or to schedule a meeting during Mobile World Congress, please contact info@interoptechnologies.com.

NCR Introduces Cloud-based Managed IT Domain Service for Telecom Carriers

NCR Corporation today launched Managed IT Domain Services, a managed service for telecommunications carriers and technology manufacturers (OEMs), which enables support for remote monitoring and management of enterprise customers’ IT domains, through cloud-based IT infrastructures.

The total service supports applications, cloud, network/WAN, security, server, storage and virtualization. More than 3,000 products from many leading networking and IT vendors can be managed. Components include a network operations center, which will monitor, identify and resolve IT infrastructure irregularities, a service desk for end-to-end incident management and a self-service portal for customers to track the real-time status of their managed environment and view key performance indicators and other metrics.

“Many CIOs today are transitioning business functions into the cloud to realize cost-savings, increase productivity and reinvent business agility,” said Nadine Routhier, vice president, NCR Telecommunications and Technology. “We’re creating exceptional value for telecom and OEM’s companies by enabling them to quickly and cost-effectively scale to meet growing demand for cloud-based services, without making extensive capital investments.”

Sophisticated configuration management and analytics tools are also included in the service to maximize network availability and reduce on-site support costs, including remote restoration and updates to managed devices. NCR research shows that 98 percent of availability issues identified through the service can be resolved remotely, and resolution time can be reduced by up to 60 percent versus traditional on-site support. Network operational data is also continuously analyzed in order to provide proactive recommendations to further enhance availability and up-time, which is critical to the success of enterprise cloud computing initiatives.


Google Fiber Has Far-reaching Implications

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Reading this post on Google’s low-cost, super-fast fiber-to-the-home initiative (makes me sort of wish I lived in Kansas City) brought to mind all the other Google products and initiatives that might be empowered by it. Go read it, then come back here and consider:

Chrome OS: it takes a long time to make a new operating system and it looks trivial today, but with widely available gigabit internet at the household and small business level it begins to look like a realistic “the network is the computer” future.

Mobile OS: Google already has that covered with Android.

Add Google Drive: Ubiquitous very high speed connectivity at a low price makes Drive viable for more than backup, sharing and synch. Actually synch becomes easier if the only copy is on a server.

Add Google Compute Engine: A thin-client netbook running Chrome OS, or Android on tablets and handsets, become more appealing if you  can quickly access network-based computing resources for high-performance computing tasks like video transcoding.

Add Google Voice: consider all those hypothetical hotspots. Combine with Android and Voice. Can a Google competitor to cell phone providers be far behind, one that leverages the coming Google network? All it would take is a couple extra capabilities in the fiber/WiFi box that seems inevitable. And don’t forget they now own Motorola, a top-notch mobile phone company.

YouTube/Google TV: Already dipping its toe into original programming, and fast fiber means TV will change dramatically.

Living In the cloud would become a real option for everyday consumers. What about effects on professionals and small businesses?

And what about those other seemingly sci-fi projects, self driving cars and Glass? Hey, if the car drives itself my brain then has the bandwidth for augmented reality. How might they benefit from the ability to hop from fiber-connected WiFi hotspot to hotspot?

All this based on a good search engine algorithm, and then ads next to search results? Who’d a thunk it?